Toward An Untacky Fourth

Invoking Daddy Frost

This won’t be my favorite Fourth of July.

I do have something, though —

Did you see where the Times described the prostitutes Diddy hired . . .

Blehhhhh

Don't tell me you haven't been following that story.

Have you been too busy hanging in there politically, keeping your spirits high, doing your bit, reconstructing American democracy point by point, vote by vote, Congressfool by Congressfool . . . ?

What you missed, in that case, was how the Times described the prostitutes Diddy hired . . .

Diddy is so close to Daddy! And Daddy is what the secretary general of NATO called You know whom. Yes. He did!

Blehhhhh.

Let’s clear the air! How about a dad joke!

"Wanna box for your leftovers?"

"No, but I'll wrestle you for them."

How about another one:

What did the drummer name his twin daughters?

Anna One, Anna Two.

Whew.

Did you see how the Times referred to the prostitutes whom Diddy hired to have (dogged, baby-oil-swathed, surely extremely unromantic) sex with ....

With his girl friends.

Blehhhh.

But how about the prostitutes? Working stiffs, so to speak. Here is how the Times referred to them: as "hired men."

Which made me go back and read, again, the Robert Frost poem, "Death of the Hired Man."

A great poem. A dialogue between a farming couple.

The hired man has always let them down. Always failed to finish the work he was hired to do. But now he is ensconced in this couple’s barn.

Now, says the woman, "He has come home to die."

"Home," says the husband. “He mocked gently," writes Frost.

"It all depends on what you mean by home," says the woman.

The husband says, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in."

The wife says "I should have called it/ Something you somehow haven't to deserve."

If we were to get politically partisan, on this day of national celebration, we could call the woman a Democrat, counseling compassion, and the husband a Republican, defending self-interest. In this case, the wife holds her end up, subtly, and the husband gives way, because he is not Stephen Miller.

WANK WANK WANK GET HIM OUT OF HERE

In other poems Frost captured almost-unbearable marital bitterness, but this is a marriage working.

The hired man — as the husband goes out and determines — is dead. We the readers already know that, from the title. So no kicker, in a tacky-media sort of sense.

“Oligarchs Don't Care If We Think They're Tacky," said a headline in the New York Times, in regard to the recent multi-multi . . . -million dollar wedding of what's-his-name Bezos and what's-her-name.

Tacky is chic now, we are told. Rich tacky, to be sure, but tacky including, as in less expensive circles, "big hair”. Play me out of here, because I happen to have written the definitive song about big hair:

You got big old hair and a little bitty heart.

I should have known about you from the start.

Your pompadour is a work of aaaaart . . .

You got big old hair and a little bitty heart.

Furthermore, in closing:

YET ANOTHER LIMERICK ABOUT

A DEPLORABLE MALE

Addressing the state of things, Wayne

Keeps up a constant refrain:

"I worry -- I'm sorry,

I'm sorry! I worry

I’m sharing too much of my pain.”

AND OKAY, ONE MORE

One thing a wise man named Mose

Will say is, "You know how it goes."

To which we nod yes

So as not to confess

That the truth is that nobody knows.